Just a few notes about my thoughts and process when it comes to developing the mobile game series "Fractal". The first project I will be tackling is "Eclipse Perilous", a survival horror roguelike for mobile.

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Dusk creatures are not the only enemies the player will encounter. As with any ship or boat, it has its own type of pests such as bugs, birds, and rats. In Eclipse Perilous, the airships of the Sky Nation of Albion is beset with pests, albeit the Elemental kind.

Most other roguelike developers prefer to path hallways between the rooms, and then instantiate walls around every floor tile. This makes creating a pathway through the dungeon a rather simple affair. In my case, however, I didn't want to have the traditional hallway type between the rooms. Rather, I want the overall design to mimic a boat - large rooms that are interconnected through passageways that run parallel.

Because of this design choice, instantiating doors has been a major pain. This is mostly because I don't know all of the tools available to me quite yet, and figuring out which one to use where takes some research. Then, of course, using it properly means iterating the code until it works. The slew of problems that had to be ironed out included the doors and walls not aligning, walls not instantiating at all, doors instantiating in room corners, wall tiles being replaced by door tiles, and so on.

You can sort of see how I refined door creation through the album belo…

Last week we discussed the idea of Dusk creatures, which are corrupted versions of creatures that appear to be condensed shadow. Last week the focus on the Duskrat, a simple scavenger with a few abilities that have the potential to hurt the player badly. This week we'll chat about the Duskblade, a much more lethal enemy the player will encounter.

In Eclipse Perilous, the majority of the enemies that are swarming the ship are versions of the people and critters who have been corrupted by the shadows pouring forth from the eclipse. They appear as ghostly forms made out of a purplish mist, which appears to darken and condense deeper within the creature itself. Think of it like seeing a person with thermal imaging, except instead of registering heat, it is registering darkness.

Alright. Clearly this devblog has fallen by the wayside; it has been months since my last post. There's a really good reason for that, however. No, it's not because I've stopped developing. I had actually gotten far enough to draft up wireframes for the game's UI. Rather, I've pivoted the project altogether. Previously, Fractal was going to be an Interactive Fiction series, however after giving it a ton of thought, I've realized that I want to develop Fractal across multiple genres. Because the stories are fairly diverse, they actually would be better if they're in different genres as well. Specifically in genres that I personally love to play myself: roguelikes, strategy, adventure, and rpg's.

Instead of developing ONI, I've pivoted to Eclipse Perilous, which will be a steampunk survival horror roguelike with crafting elements. I love roguelikes. I must have been eight or nine when I was introduced to the game that spawned the whole genre - Rogue. …